Creatures

“Let’s take a seat, shall we?” Mrs. Willing said, indicating the miniature chairs meant for three-year-olds. She lowered herself gracefully and perched on one haunch with disarming ease. James marvelled at the feat of physics that allowed such a large woman to balance so effortlessly, but a quick glance at his wife reminded him not to entertain thoughts of Mrs. Willing’s size. When Marco had come home from his first day at preschool announcing that his new teacher was fat, James had started up a riff: Fat as a bear? Fat as a whale? Fat as your big fat belly (followed by blowing onto Marco’s delightful stomach)? Melinda had laughed, but then insisted that they have a serious discussion about why we shouldn’t judge people by their looks because what counted was on the inside. James was certain that when Marco grew old enough to realize that this aphoristic world his parents insisted on did not exist he would despise them.

James could see that Melinda was on edge. Since they’d moved from the city, she’d put aside her utilitarian skirts and sexless blouses—a professional armor that had girded her for the daily battle at the hospital where she worked—in favor of more friendly and relaxed attire, better suited to a small-town medical practice and to the promise of this new, less stressful life. But for today she’d put on her best dress, a gray silk. A centipede of buttons crept over one shoulder and up the high collar, accentuating the delicacy of her frame, her finely structured face, and her grave expression. He’d fallen in love with her precise edges—her tidy hair, her fingernails filed into perfect almond shapes, the neatness of her pale mouth—and the fact that she took the world so seriously that serious things rarely shocked her the way they might a more frivolous woman. But he could tell, by the way she was rubbing together her forefinger and thumb, that she was uneasy. He’d noticed the habit on their fourth date, when it had been clear that something was romantically afoot between them and he’d decided to tell her about what had happened to him when he was a boy. She had taken the news in silence, nodding almost imperceptibly as if listening to the litany of one of her patients’ symptoms, her mind constructing and dismantling various possibilities as the information accrued, but her fingers had begun to work.

“Did he hit someone?” Melinda asked. James was taken aback by how easily she accepted Mrs. Willing’s characterization of their son. But, of course, it had been her adaptability to discomfiting information that had allowed the fourth date to become the fifth, and a marriage and a child to follow.

Mrs. Willing laughed. “Oh, I wouldn’t have called you in for hitting,” she said lightly. “It’s the gunplay I’m concerned about.”

“You have toy guns here?” James said.

“Of course not,” Mrs. Willing said. “I’m talking about Marco’s guns.”

“We don’t buy toy guns for our son,” Melinda said.

She’d been adamant about that. They knew parents who had developed elaborate hierarchies about weaponry. Toy handguns were acceptable but not toy rifles. Or, no toy guns were allowed except water pistols, because those were hardly guns at all. One family disallowed all modern weaponry but had a veritable armory of toy swords and cudgels and crossbows, the justification being, vaguely, history.

“If he’s not hitting, what is the problem exactly?” James said to Mrs. Willing, his eyes travelling from her face to her lap, where she gripped a raspberry-colored folder as if it held a rap sheet filled with all of Marco’s preschool infractions. He knew that his tone was brusque, but it was his job to defend his son, even against this pleasant woman who had a master’s degree in child development and twenty years of classroom experience.

“He spends a lot of his free play chasing the other children with a stick,” Mrs. Willing said. She paused and lowered her voice. “He calls it his AK-47.”

“Marco doesn’t know what that is,” Melinda said.

“None of the other children talk about semi-automatic weapons,” Mrs. Willing said.

“Of Marco?” The image of his son’s sweet monkey face, his milk-chocolate eyes, his plump cheeks, and his loose spirals of chestnut hair appeared to James. And Marco’s voice! The low gravel of it, as though he’d been born with a two-pack-a-day habit. This, and his inability to pronounce his “r”s, was a combination that James found irresistible. “I willy, willy want it,” James would sometimes whisper throatily into the back of Melinda’s warm neck. “Frightened of Marco?” he repeated.

“He told Sam he was going to kill him,” Mrs. Willing said quietly.

Melinda let out a sound, and Mrs. Willing put a hand on her arm, a gesture that might have been sympathetic if it weren’t so cannily inclusive, suggesting that Melinda had already made the same leap as Mrs. Willing: from Marco running around with a stick to Marco shooting up a school.

“Children say things,” James said.

“Nevertheless,” Mrs. Willing said.

After the meeting, James dropped Melinda at her office in town. When he returned to the house, he went straight to his workshop, in the converted garage. They had moved here a year earlier, when Melinda was burned out by the steady flow of stab wounds and battered women she treated at the hospital in the city and James was yearning for the simplicity of small-town life. The irony that he had made enough money to allow for this bucolic transition by designing the distinctive chairs and tables used by an urban caffeine empire was not lost on either of them—but it was that ongoing contract that had allowed them to purchase their hundred-year-old house and to buy out the practice of one of the town’s retiring doctors. The coffee-company franchises had proliferated at a nearly cellular rate. James needed to visit the factory that produced the furniture only every two months or so. The rest of the time, he was free to work on refurbishing their home.

James had always been good with his hands, even as a boy, when his belief that anything he could imagine he could also make was as strong and urgent in him as all the other unfounded faiths of childhood. He’d grown up in a suburb whose rural qualities had been a result of neglect, not design. His family’s house backed up against a ravine, and he had spent long hours staring out the window, imagining that if he pedalled his bicycle fast enough, and if his bicycle had wings, then he could race himself off one side of the ravine and soar straight across to the other. “That’s a lot of ifs,” his mother said. He can still remember his visceral conviction that she was wrong—that the difference between possibility and impossibility was no greater than the last twist of a wrench that finally loosened a bolt. He pestered her incessantly to study his crudely drawn designs, until, fed up with his unwillingness to recognize that she had three other children under the age of five to care for, she bought him a model airplane. To any other child whose family, on a budget, doled out one birthday gift and one Christmas gift a year, this might have seemed an unexpected boon. But James suffered through the hours in the dank basement that he and his reluctant father, dulled after his day’s work at the Toyota dealership, spent gluing together the minuscule parts of the German Stuka, both knowing, from opposite ends of experience, that a useless miniature could never compensate for a grand vision. On his ninth birthday, James asked to be taken to the St. Vincent de Paul dump. His parents, busy with, as it turned out, the unknitting of their marriage, were happy to have a son whose idea of a birthday gift was a trunk load of junk and a box of nails. They didn’t bother to find out what he was up to until he crash-landed into the ravine and broke his arm in two places.

Freddie Connolly was two years younger than James, a boy from the neighborhood whom James’s mother had agreed to watch on Saturdays for the pocket money. Freddie’s mother worked at a hair salon, and his father managed the night shift for the gas-and-electric company and slept during the day. Freddie had a crinkle of red hair and adenoidal breathing, which made him sound as if his nose were a clogged drainpipe. When he was particularly excited, his words came out in a rush of air and spit. James wasn’t happy to be saddled with this unappealing boy, but Freddie sat for hours and listened to James’s schemes, nodding his head fervently as if James were a Bible-thumping minister and Freddie his truest believer. Tape ten flattened cardboard boxes together to make a slide from the second-floor bedroom window right into the twins’ kiddie pool? Hallelujah! Re-create the Wizard of Oz’s balloon with dry-cleaning plastic, a bicycle pump, and a wicker hamper? Amen! James both derided his disciple for his unquestioning faith and was keenly aware that, without Freddie, he would be a boy with a head full of ideas that interested no one.

James ran his hand along a piece of birch that was lying on his workbench, studying the knots and whorls embedded in the wood, thinking vaguely of the table that would emerge from it. Memories of Freddie came to him at odd times—when Marco had a cold and his voice was thick with mucus, or when another child’s freckles brought to mind Freddie’s discolorations, which were laid on so thickly it was as if a painter had shaken out a brush on his ruddy cheeks.

All boys play with guns, James thought suddenly, the defensive rage he’d felt that morning at the preschool resurging. Though he himself had never craved that sort of toy. His mother had remarked on that when the police came to the house. She’d said she always thought it was funny that he’d never asked for a gun for Christmas, as if this were his larger crime.

That night, at the dinner table, Melinda gave James a meaningful look.

“Marco,” James began. “We have to talk about something.”

“Something important, honey,” Melinda added.

Marco speared a tube of pasta with his fork, then shook it so that the food danced and bits of red sauce flew onto his placemat.

“Mrs. Willing said that maybe you are too rough at school,” James said.

Marco chewed, working his jaws with the tremendous effort of an ant laboring to move a pebble.

“Do you know what Daddy’s talking about?” Melinda said.

“Unh-unh,” Marco said, shaking his head.

“It’s about pretending to shoot people with a stick,” James said. “Some kids don’t like that.”

“No kids like that,” Melinda said. “When you point your stick at kids and pretend it’s a gun, it frightens them.”

“It is a gun,” Marco said.

“No, it’s not, sweetie,” Melinda said. “It’s just a stick.”

“It’s a gun,” Marco repeated.

“It’s a stick that you are pretending is a gun,” James said.

“It shoots bullets,” Marco said.

“Pretend bullets,” Melinda said.

“O.K.,” James said, unwilling to fall further into this rhetorical quagmire. “The point is: Sam was scared of the way you were playing.”

Marco put down his fork and looked at James as if to explain more clearly. “I’m the policeman and Sam is the wobber. He stoled. He’s the bad guy.”

“In the game he’s the bad guy, but not in real life. In real life, Sam is your friend,” Melinda said. “And we don’t tell our friends we want to ki— to hurt them. We don’t want to hurt anybody.”

Marco poked at his plate with his finger. “He’s the bad guy and I’m the policeman.”

“In the game,” Melinda said.

“This is ridiculous,” James mumbled. “Look, Marco. Here’s the deal. Don’t tell kids you’re going to kill them. Even if you’re playing bad guys and good guys. Even if you’re playing war, for fuck’s sake—”

“James!” Melinda said.

“Even if you’re playing war where the idea is to kill the other guy, because that’s the whole point of war. Just don’t do it. No killing. Not ever. O.K.? Those are Mrs. Willing’s rules, whether you like them or not.”

“And our rules,” Melinda added.

“Yes. And our rules, too. No killing Mommy and Daddy. O.K., Marco?”

“O.K., Daddy.”

Later, after they had put Marco to sleep, Melinda said what deserved to be said. He listened and apologized and agreed that children were confused by sarcasm and that it was peevish of him to try to turn his three-year-old son against his well-meaning teacher.

“But she is overreacting,” he said. “You have to admit that.”

“Sam was scared.”

“Sam should grow a pair.”

Finally, Melinda laughed. How he loved to make her laugh! Her careful exterior shattered into a peal of coquettish giggles. She was not an easy mark, and his ability to get a rise out of her made him feel capable beyond measure. It was the true cement of their intimacy.

“Still,” she said, calming down, “Mrs. Willing has to protect all the children.”

“Marco didn’t intend to scare Sam,” James said, quietly.

“I know that,” she said.

It was always a question of intention. “What are your intentions, sir?” Melinda had said playfully, when James reached underneath her shirt for the first time. The truth was that he had no idea why, at that particular moment, his hands had moved where they did. It wasn’t as if he’d said to himself, “Now I’m going to feel her up,” but, suddenly, there were his fingers, playing across the lace of her bra, and then there was his palm pressing against her hardening nipple. There had been no motive, only a kind of thoughtless lurch toward the next thing. Which is what his life had been ever since he was nine years old. The first few years after the accident (his mother’s term for it—spoken insistently to the 911 operator—had stuck) had not been difficult; in fact, he’d sometimes had the sense that teachers and even other parents were too easy on him, excusing a bad grade or a poorly pitched ball, as if they felt sorry for him. High school was different, though. Teen-agers were alternately curious and cruel, and he spent the four years skulking through hallways, head bent, shoulders hunched, a baseball cap pulled low. Girls were out of the question. That would have involved a kind of intimate scrutiny he could not even imagine. After he graduated, he spent a year smoking pot and reading in the basement of his mother’s house, with no plan other than to do more of the same, until she told him he had to pay rent or move out.

He was not especially driven to work construction, but he had amassed a nearly professional collection of tools, and he was willing to be paid under the table. He was relieved to find that the other men on the crew didn’t know his history and didn’t care to, that they didn’t, in fact, want to talk to him at all, except to occasionally complain about how slow he was cutting rebar. It was only after he’d asked the foreman for some of the remaindered wood and crafted a single chair and a table small enough for a person not to feel lonely when sitting alone, and only after a guy who was starting a chain of coffee shops happened to drive by as the newly stained chair and table were drying outside the dismal first-floor efficiency apartment he had rented, that the narrow aperture of his life opened up.

He woke, certain that Freddie had been in his dream, although he could not fetch up a narrative and was left only with the exhausted sense of having not completed a necessary task. Melinda was sleeping on her back, as she always did, the even rise and fall of her chest untroubled. He stared at her profile, the line of her nose, the pinprick pores of her skin. She trusted him not to hurt her. She’d said that when they’d agreed to marry. They had been in another bed then, the ring box lying between them like an open jaw. He knew that she was talking about fidelity—her father had cheated on her mother—but he wondered if she’d meant other kinds of injury as well.

Freddie’s family had moved out of the neighborhood a few years after the accident. James had watched from his bedroom window as the moving van pulled away from the curb. He was too ashamed to join the other neighbors who had wandered out of their homes to say goodbye, because he had never done what he’d meant to do, which was to speak to Mrs. Connolly. At the funeral, when he and his mother had stopped to offer their condolences, Mrs. Connolly had reached out her gloved hand and touched James’s face. The feel of the cold leather on his cheek had frightened him. He saw, through her honeycombed veil, that her eyes were darting back and forth with indecision, as if she were unsure whether to comfort him or slap him. During the service, his mother cried. He did not cry, although he had the feeling that people were watching to see if he would. The idea of going to talk to Mrs. Connolly occurred to him afterward. He thought that if she could finally make up her mind about him, then he would understand how to live the rest of his life. But time passed, and what might once have been a natural thing to do became awkward. And there was the levelling effect of the semantics that everyone had somehow agreed upon, in an effort to preëmpt the possibility of a deeper undoing. It was an “accident” to spill a glass of milk or fall off your skateboard and twist your ankle. You didn’t cross over three front lawns to apologize for that.

Freddie had pointed out the tracks first. He knew they were deer markings because his father had taught him a few things in preparation for the day when he would finally take Freddie hunting. The boys followed the markings through the trees to the edge of the ravine. They slid down the embankment on their bottoms, then picked their way across the stream on a path of loose stones, slipping here and there so that their canvas sneakers filled with icy water. Using rocks and exposed roots as handholds, they pulled themselves up onto flat land, but there the trail disappeared. They spent the next few Saturdays outside, fashioning bows and arrows out of branches and calling each other by invented Indian tracker names. Freddie must have mentioned their games to his father, because, before the season was over, Mr. Connolly invited James to join them for Freddie’s inaugural hunt.

“I’m not sure how your father would feel about that,” his mother said dubiously, when he asked for permission.

“What’s he got to do with it?” James said. By this time his father had married a woman named Joyce, and they had a new baby.

“He’s still your father,” she said vaguely. She had taken a part-time job as a secretary at a real-estate office, where she had real responsibilities, as she reminded her children when their demands became overwhelming and she needed to go to her room and lie down. Still, James would often catch her glancing at the telephone as if she were waiting for his father to call and tell her that he would be late and that they should just “go ahead,” the way he used to do, as if she were unable to inhabit her future without his approval.

Finally, after much cajoling, she agreed, and James, carrying a worn sleeping bag and a mess kit cobbled together from his sister’s plastic kitchen set, joined Mr. Connolly and Freddie beside the Ram Charger parked in Freddie’s driveway.

Red of hair and face like his son, Mr. Connolly was talkative on the drive, telling the story of how he’d once tracked a deer for seven hours before bagging it. “Buck just folded up its legs and went down graceful. It was a beautiful sight to behold,” he said, narrowing his eyes as if he could see the scene on the road ahead. He advised the boys that they needed to think like an animal in order to know what it would do next.

“We’re all wild creatures, aren’t we?” Mr. Connolly said. “It’s just that our whole instinct business has gone to pot. Now all anybody wants is a nice comfortable chair and a TV. You got a comfortable chair and ‘Wheel of Fortune’ and you think you’ve got it made. Right, Freddie?”

Freddie, sitting between his father and James, did not answer. Mr. Connolly put a thick hand on his son’s narrow thigh. “Well, Freddie likes his TV, that’s for sure,” he said. “What do you think, Jimmy?”

“I guess,” James said, not entirely sure what the question was. “My mom watches that show sometimes.”

“Well, there’s no TV where we’re heading. No TV at all.”

Once they arrived at the campground, James and Freddie helped Mr. Connolly set up the tent, then collected kindling for the fire. Mr. Connolly was very impressed when James invented a contraption, using a rain slicker and ropes, that could haul more wood out of the forest than either boy could manage on his own.

“Your pal’s a thinker, Freddie,” he said, tapping his son’s forehead with his finger.

James felt proud, but also concerned that Mr. Connolly was suggesting that such a smart boy as James might not want a friend who watched television, a friend like his son. The confusion made James nervous around the man, and that night he worked hard to tend the fire and scour the pots they’d used to cook the baked beans. After dinner, the boys watched Mr. Connolly clean his hunting rifle. He showed them how to load it and let each boy have a try before he returned the torpedo-shaped shells to their box. They slept in the tent, Mr. Connolly lying between the two boys. James was careful to face away so that there would be no possibility of his rolling into the man, or, worse, curling up to him as he had with his father on the occasions when he’d had a bad dream and had been allowed into his parents’ bed.

The next day, Mr. Connolly woke them early and gave them each a water canteen, a chocolate bar, and an orange vest to hang over their jackets. He warned them not to speak and to follow him in single file at all times. “You never want to walk in front of a man with a loaded gun,” he said. “Simple logic, right, Jimmy?”

Freddie followed his father, and James fell in behind. It was still cold, and, while Freddie had been outfitted with what looked to be a new wool hunting jacket, James had only a sweatshirt under his windbreaker. His face and the tips of his fingers began to sting. Every so often, Mr. Connolly would point at scat on the ground or at a cluster of leaves that James thought must be a sign of recent animal activity. Or he might simply stop, cock his head, and listen to something. James tried to distinguish animal noises from those of the birds and the sound of the breeze in the trees, but he guessed he was like the people Mr. Connolly complained about, the ones who had lost their instinct. They had not eaten breakfast and James began to feel the kind of nausea he associated with being starving in math class with two periods left before lunch. He put his hand on the chocolate bar in his pocket, but realized that it would be impossible to open the wrapper without making noise. He felt a blister start up on his heel and, remembering Mr. Connolly’s story, he worried that they would have to walk for seven hours or more.

Mr. Connolly stopped suddenly, then quickly fell into a crouch and lifted the rifle. When the boys followed suit, he put out a warning hand to stop their movement. James did not know whether to sink the rest of the way to the ground or stand back up, so he remained in a half-squat. He tried to see in front of Freddie and Mr. Connolly to whatever the man was aiming at, but his legs were shaking from his awkward stance and he thought if he moved he might fall over. In the silence, he became aware of Freddie’s breathing. Air moving through the obstacle course of Freddie’s throat and nose created an undertone that, as James concentrated on it, became as relentless and as deafening as the buzz of a broken fluorescent light. He tapped Freddie on the shoulder. Freddie turned, opening his mouth to speak, but what came out was an exhale of mucus that seemed more pronounced for having been suppressed for so long, and at the same time the gun fired, the crack and shock sending James sprawling. He heard the swoop of birds’ wings as they cleared the trees, and Mr. Connolly roaring “God damn it!,” as he bounded ahead, his rifle pushing aside branches, which then smacked Freddie and James in the face as they ran to keep up. By the time Mr. Connolly stopped, Freddie was crying. Mr. Connolly looked at his son for a moment, but his gaze seemed unfocussed, as if he were seeing not Freddie’s distress but the whole series of mistakes that had led to this moment, in which his only son was sobbing in the woods, snot running thickly from his nose.

When they returned to the camp, Mr. Connolly instructed the boys to take down the tent. The sun fell early, and most of the drive home was illuminated only by the truck’s headlights bouncing off the thick fog.

“Are we there yet?” Freddie asked, when they had been driving for nearly three hours without speaking.

Mr. Connolly pulled over to the side of the road and stopped. “Yes. We’re here. Get out.” He waited with the engine running while the dumbfounded boys struggled into their jackets and hats, but Mr. Connolly laid a hand on James’s arm. “Not you,” he said.

“I didn’t tell you to get out,” Mr. Connolly said. “I told Freddie to get out.”

Without a word, Freddie stepped out of the truck. The door was barely shut when Mr. Connolly pulled back onto the road.

It took no more than ten minutes for Mr. Connolly and James to arrive back on their street, but James waited on his front porch for a full hour before he saw Freddie’s small, dark figure coming down the sidewalk. James met him and they walked together to the Connolly front door. They parted without saying goodbye.

Marco was expelled from school.

“Suspended,” Melinda corrected, when James phoned her office. It was ten in the morning. The school secretary had called and said that Marco needed to be picked up immediately.

“That makes it better?” he said. “What kind of a preschool kicks children out?”

When he arrived at the school, Marco was in the hallway, sitting quietly on a bench beside the classroom assistant, Angela. He looked like a person waiting at a Greyhound station. After James had hugged him and reassured him that everything was O.K., he told him to wait for a few more minutes.

He opened the classroom door. Mrs. Willing sat on the floor, reading a book to a gathering of children who lay against her side and across her lap and lolled on pillows strewn around her as if they were enjoying a Roman bath. She did not stop reading when she noticed James, so he walked closer and hovered over the group like an impatient diner waiting for a table to open up. Eventually, Mrs. Willing closed her book and instructed the children to begin a different activity.

“I’m sure you can see that it is disruptive when a parent walks in without an appointment,” she said, as she led James into the kitchenette attached to the classroom. Two trays lined with Dixie cups sat on the counter. She began to fill the cups with Goldfish crackers from a giant jar.

“Being called to come and pick up my kid at ten in the morning without any explanation is disruptive,” James said.

“Marco bit Sam,” Mrs. Willing said.

“You kick a kid out of nursery school because he got into a little fight?”

“There was no fight. The boys weren’t even playing together. Marco walked up to Sam and bit him.”

James was momentarily speechless. “What is it between Marco and that kid?” he said, his voice faltering.

“Sam is a very peaceful boy,” she said.

“And Marco is what?”

“I can give you the name of a doctor some parents have consulted.”

“A psychiatrist? You think Marco needs a shrink?”

“I think we need to discuss, at another time, how best to handle the situation. For now, I’d appreciate it if you’d take him home. Marco understands that this is an appropriate consequence of his action.”

James wanted to grip Mrs. Willing by her doughy shoulders and shake her.

She lifted up the full tray. “And I need Angela to help me with snack time.”

“Leave some for the kids,” James said.

That day, James was scheduled to make the two-hour drive to the factory. Rather than cancel, he decided to take Marco with him. It was clear that the boy was confused to be out of school when he should have been singing “The Wheels on the Bus” and fitting together cardboard puzzle pieces. James wondered how Mrs. Willing had acted in the moment. Had she said, in sweetly non-threatening tones, “I’m going to say it’s not O.K. to bite Sam”? Or had she simply yelled at Marco? He was upset to think that Marco might have suffered shame or embarrassment in front of his friends. James’s distress turned to anger, and he pulled over at a gas station, ostensibly to fill up, but while he was out of the car he called Melinda.

“That woman is a first-class bitch,” he said, when she came to the phone.

“Can Marco hear you?”

“No, Marco can’t hear me. What do you think I am?”

“I think you’re angry.”

“Aren’t you?”

“Yes, of course I’m angry. I’m upset.”

“You don’t sound like it. You don’t sound like anything.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

But he didn’t know what he meant, only that it felt good to lash out, to accuse her of something, of anything, even if it meant that he would have to apologize later. Neither he nor Melinda said anything for a long time, and he listened to the strange vacuum of sound that the cell phone delivered when no one was speaking, a technological absence that felt annihilating.

“Are you there?” he said, finally.

“How is he?” she said.

James bent down and peered at Marco through the car window. “Quiet. Weirdly quiet.”

“We’ll get past this,” she said. “And then it will be just something that happened.”

“Do you believe that?”

“Of course I do,” she said. “Nobody died.”

At the factory, the secretary made a fuss over Marco. She gave him a butterscotch candy from the bowl on her desk and insisted on taking him on a tour of the factory. She and James led Marco from the loading dock, where the teak boards were piled high, past the loud machinery where the wood was cut and shaped, all the way through to the station where the finished pieces were checked for faults. Marco was mesmerized by everything, but he was most entranced by the leftover scraps of raw wood that lay scattered on the ground.

“Would you like some to take home?” the secretary asked.

Marco’s face lit up for the first time that day. “Can I make something in your workshop?” he asked James, as the secretary went off in search of a bag.

The town where James had grown up was only half an hour away, and, on a whim, James drove there. He wanted to show Marco the place where he had imagined flying bicycles and other impossibilities. What was once a suburb of modest aluminum-sided homes was now part of an indeterminate sprawl, studded with warehouses and small industries that had taken advantage of the low rents. James drove down his old street and parked in front of his childhood home, which had been sold years ago, when his mother died. Nothing substantial had been done to alter the façade, but somehow the place looked unfamiliar.

“This is where I lived when I was your age, buddy,” he said, glancing into the rearview mirror, but Marco had fallen asleep in his car seat, his head tilted to the side, his bag of woodchips clutched in his hand.

The Saturday after the hunting weekend, Freddie had showed up at the house as usual.

“Are you making something?” Freddie asked, when James’s mother called him down from his bedroom to greet the boy.

James shook his head. His father had come to take him and his siblings out for pizza earlier that week and had brought gifts, something he’d been doing since the new baby was born. He said that the gifts were from little June, and James was angry that he had to accept the preposterous suggestion that a baby could go out and buy toys. June had “given” James a set of Lego, but James didn’t see the point of following a series of steps that someone else had already decided upon so that he could end up with a firehouse that looked exactly like the one in the picture on the box.

“What do you want to do?” Freddie asked.

James put on his jacket and the boys went outside. They threw acorns at the side of the house for a while, then knocked down spiderwebs. When they grew tired of this, they crossed through the trees to the ravine. They sat on leaves that were still damp from the previous night’s rain, and tossed clods of dirt into the stream below.

James saw it first: a shadow among the trees across the water. When he looked more carefully, he could see nothing but leaves and branches, and yet he knew that something was different from what it had been just moments before. He was conscious of his breath moving in and out of his body, of the heaviness of his tongue in his mouth, of the coldness of his eyeballs in their sockets. And then one, two, three deer stepped out from behind the leaves. Their hides were the color of toast, their muzzles dappled with white. One of them was smaller than the others, its legs spindly and knobbed at the joints. The animals grazed, moving slowly here and there, poking their noses into bits of earth and brush. Suddenly Freddie stood up. James put a finger to his lips to quiet him, but the boy was already running back through the trees toward his house. It occurred to James that maybe Freddie was afraid of the wild animals and that this was why he had cried on the day of the hunt, but thoughts of his friend disappeared when one of the animals looked directly at him and seemed to observe him for a while. James was amazed and then proud that the deer was not spooked by his presence, that it did not perceive him as an enemy. And he was not an enemy; he resolved right then that he would never go hunting again. He was a creature, just like Mr. Connolly had said. He was a creature, alone with other creatures.

He turned at the sound of footsteps behind him, holding out his hand to stop whoever it was from coming closer and scaring off the deer, but Freddie kept walking, and James realized that he was carrying Mr. Connolly’s hunting rifle. “What are you doing?” James whispered, when Freddie was by his side. The boy kneeled down and positioned the rifle against his shoulder. The heavy butt wavered as he tried to steady it. He cocked the gun. James yelled and waved his arms wildly in order to warn the deer, but they did not move. He grabbed the rifle, but Freddie held onto it with a strength that James had not expected and the two boys began to wrestle with the gun between them, pushing and pulling at each other.

“Who’s there?” It was a man’s voice. “Freddie, is that you?”

Mr. Connolly ran through the trees, his big body thrashing against the low branches. He was barefoot and dressed in pajamas. “Son!” he yelled. “Put down the gun! Do not move!”

James used the opportunity of Freddie’s surprise to yank the rifle away from him just as it fired. The shot deafened him, and he heard nothing as Mr. Connolly fell to the ground.

After they had put Marco to bed, Melinda and James sat together at the kitchen table, a bottle of wine open between them. Melinda was crying softly. Right before they had turned off Marco’s light, he’d asked if he was going to go to school the following day. They’d had to tell him no.

“I hate that school,” Melinda said. “I hate that Mrs. Wilson. Willing.” She covered her face, embarrassed by the disorganization of her feelings.

“We’re pulling him out of there,” James said, pouring more wine into their glasses. “We’ll find another school, where kids can hit and bite and draw blood,” he said. “We’ll find a school with a pro-war curriculum.”

“The only other preschool here is called Happy Valley,” she said.

Neither of them laughed at the absurdity.

“You don’t think anything is wrong with him, do you?” she said.

He looked at her for a moment, trying to fathom her meaning. “You know there’s nothing wrong with him,” he said quietly.

Later, after she had gone to bed, he went to his workshop. He wasn’t sure why he was there, knew only that he would not be able to sleep. He wanted the morning to come so that the day’s events would become part of the past, wanted tomorrow and the day after that to provide a platform from which he could watch what had happened recede and lose its shape, becoming something named and manageable. He turned on the light above his worktable. He had not yet cut into the birch. Maybe it wouldn’t be their new dining-room table. He wondered if he could make it into a go-kart or a sled, if there was something he could fashion that would make his son remember this time differently. A lot of ifs. He snapped off the light. He was too tired and too drunk to work, and, anyway, the sound of machinery might wake up Marco, who deserved some peaceful sleep before confronting another day of adults spouting platitudes and avoiding the truth.

The truth was this: there had been a moment in the woods, after he’d wrenched the gun from Freddie’s grasp, when James had felt his finger slide into the smooth, ear-like curve of the trigger, when he’d felt the snug rightness of his body in the world, the way he had when he’d pedalled his winged bike toward the edge of the ravine, going faster and faster until what was impossible had become possible and there was no more reason to think or doubt. And then there had been the split second when his instinct had kicked in, but it was too late.

He stood at the open doorway of his workshop, facing the house. The light in his and Melinda’s bedroom was off. She would be asleep now, lying on her back, her arms resting by her sides. The gun had fired. Or he had fired the gun. Which was it? This was the question he’d seen in Mrs. Connolly’s eyes through the scrim of her funeral veil. Soon he would slip into bed and watch the certainty of his wife’s sleep and wonder again if he knew the answer. ♦

Fiction by Lara Vapnyar: “Maria Petrovna had to pick two sex-education teachers. I had good reason to worry.”

As the years passed, Tom grew more entrenched in his homelessness. He was absorbed in lofty fantasies and private missions, aware of the basest necessities and the most transcendent abstractions, and almost nothing in between.